Preschool

I've decided that the best learning environment is playschool.

Picture a nice quiet library with no books out of place, uncluttered walls, and nothing visually distracting. I don't think I've learned a thing in this kind of setting. The plainer the wall is, the more blankly I stare at it.

Now picture a busy playschool with toys heaped randomly on the colorfully stained floor and finger paintings falling off the rainbow-colored walls. How much have you learned in this kind of environment? Hitting the kid who's hogging the red push-car over the head with your Fisher Price hammer gets you in trouble. Finger paint doesn't taste good, but eating it is an easy way to get help drawing the cookie monster.

For a more recent example, think of how much you learned while sleeping off one of those Monday morning Application of Engineering Principles classes. Compare that with how much you learned in a cluttered high-school shop with random parts of alternators and starters in even more random places.

I know that any well-organized professor would disagree with this, but from my disordered perspective, I find that the more scattered the environment, the less scrambled my brain is, and the more I learn.

So, who's up for finding the brightest colors of paint that exist, filling up water balloons with them, going into some unsuspecting classroom, having a balloon fight, and totally showing up Picasso?

And who's bringing the Duplo?

Okay, seriously, here is what I think about learning:

• Mistakes are excellent teachers
• Trial and error teaches the most useful skills
• Learning by observing, then doing, works well
• The above point does not apply when in a classroom
• Interest level is closely linked to learning level

Trippin in Little Boots

Welcome to my Communications 142 blog. Dr. Jacobs likes making me trip over my words, and I'll be falling all over the place. How do you write 300 words about nothing with clarity, concision and logic if you're not a woman?

I'm stoked that we'll finally be able to make something other than redundant write-ups in shop class this semester. Making useless metal air-powered engines in fabrication class will definitely beat writing redundant reports that use 12 pages of tree to give 2 sentences worth of valuable information to a teacher that just writes "ok" on everything.

We should get together in fab class and make a boot especially for the OC security golf cart. It would be quite simple, but we could paint a picture of a yellow rubber duck on it and make it fancy to show security just how much we care for them. Then we could drive or drag the cart into the entrance to KSS and boot it up. Anyway, it would be sweet to watch security driving around later in a golf cart with mace-shaped hubs and a $500 alarm system.

I wonder if any of our teachers are cool enough to help make the boot without leaking the news to security. We should tell them about the UBC students and teachers that suspend a Volkswagen Bug in an intersection and bet them that they couldn’t do any better. Where’s a good place to suspend a booted golf cart in Kelowna?

Then our professional communication skills will really be needed. We’ll have to be able to spew garbage out of our mouths like a seasoned blogger when security asks us why their precious golf cart disappeared.

Anyway, fabrication class should be lots of fun even if we don't pull off the most pathetic hijacking in Kelowna's history.

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